Through a Child's Eyes
You who have held yourselves closed hard
Against warm sun and wind, shelled up in fears
And hostile to a touch or tender word -
The ocean rises, salt as unshed tears.
- from "Of Molluscs," May Sarton
The tremor of new truth in yesterday's American observance of the terrors of the attacks of September 11, now ten years later, was mirrored perfectly in children's faces. My own two, now 20 and 22, were then children: old enough to understand, and young enough to still hold faith with the world. They were frightened. The attacks made no sense. The uncertainty and danger of the world fully evident, they clung to a belief that the fundamentally wrong was also fundamentally unreasonable, and therefore, surely not part of the structure of life? Such blind and unprovoked attacks shouldn't have occurred in a moral world, and yet they did. Many of us placed the violence within a paradigm of what we called "momentary insanity."
Ten years later, I see that my children do not think the violence of the world, the terrorism of global dissidence, is "momentary" at all. Insane, yes. But extreme catastrophic violence is now part of every day of every year as the world polarizes around class, religion, culture, and politics. The world has become more chaotic and less comprehensible with every passing year. The violence irrational and theoretical, the impact brutal and inhumane. What is really at stake is our faith in a rational universe, in which good works, good character, and good intentions mean something. If we are targets of destruction for what we symbolize because of our differentness, our oppositional values, then fundamental commonality has been hijacked by fear. What all of us possess, our humanity, becomes irrelevant. And in that world, random violence replaces understanding. The world teeters on the brink of a loss of faith in goodness.
The now adult children of September 11 were not nearly as swept away by emotion as their parents on this day of observance and remembrance. This is their world: violent, unpredictable, complicated. They do not remember the innocence of what the world felt like before. And that is a huge loss. The mark of what this day means to all of us now is that everything changed.
Against warm sun and wind, shelled up in fears
And hostile to a touch or tender word -
The ocean rises, salt as unshed tears.
- from "Of Molluscs," May Sarton
The tremor of new truth in yesterday's American observance of the terrors of the attacks of September 11, now ten years later, was mirrored perfectly in children's faces. My own two, now 20 and 22, were then children: old enough to understand, and young enough to still hold faith with the world. They were frightened. The attacks made no sense. The uncertainty and danger of the world fully evident, they clung to a belief that the fundamentally wrong was also fundamentally unreasonable, and therefore, surely not part of the structure of life? Such blind and unprovoked attacks shouldn't have occurred in a moral world, and yet they did. Many of us placed the violence within a paradigm of what we called "momentary insanity."
Ten years later, I see that my children do not think the violence of the world, the terrorism of global dissidence, is "momentary" at all. Insane, yes. But extreme catastrophic violence is now part of every day of every year as the world polarizes around class, religion, culture, and politics. The world has become more chaotic and less comprehensible with every passing year. The violence irrational and theoretical, the impact brutal and inhumane. What is really at stake is our faith in a rational universe, in which good works, good character, and good intentions mean something. If we are targets of destruction for what we symbolize because of our differentness, our oppositional values, then fundamental commonality has been hijacked by fear. What all of us possess, our humanity, becomes irrelevant. And in that world, random violence replaces understanding. The world teeters on the brink of a loss of faith in goodness.
The now adult children of September 11 were not nearly as swept away by emotion as their parents on this day of observance and remembrance. This is their world: violent, unpredictable, complicated. They do not remember the innocence of what the world felt like before. And that is a huge loss. The mark of what this day means to all of us now is that everything changed.
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